Developer notes

Building the image

Testing notes

Installation

These notes are based on using XS 0.6d [[1]]. The image was uncompressed and written to a 8GB microSD card (class4). The microSD card was plugged into a XO using a SD adapter. Note that the XO had developer keys so that it could boot from the SD card. Also note, that the install was updated from the olpcxs-testing repo using 'yum --enablerepo=olpcxs-testing update'

We also installed [munin] ('yum install munin munin-node' followed by 'chkconfig --levels 345 munin-node on' and '/etc/init.d/munin-node start') to keep track of performance. The charts below were produced by Munin via rrdtool. Munin makes itself available at http://schoolserver/munin/

We did not set up any swap partitions and Squid was not turned on for this test.

Performance

Overall performance is acceptable for the 10 XOs we had in the pool, although bulk of the XOs were either routing to the Internet (eth0 via USB-to-Ethernet) or collaborating across XOs via Gabble. They were not using Moodle extensively. Initial Moodle access does tend to be slow. Performance may improve with a class 6 card (we did not have access to a class 6 card). Other points of interest are the point when we ran yum update, and when the XOs register and access the schoolserver link, leading to Moodle. There's also the corresponding CPU usage below.

From an end-user perspective, the XS-on-XO held up throughout the test (about 4 hours) while continuously serving 10 XOs. The users did not complain about any slowdown of the network, collaboration problems, etc. ejabberd did not fail throughout the test.